washingtonpost.com — The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), from which U.S Watch Lists are drawn from, has grown to the point that it threatens to overwhelm the people who manage it. The bloated Database has become a vacuum cleaner for both proven and unproven information and has created serious concerns about secrecy, errors and privacy.
Mar 25, 2007 View in Crawl 4
david76Mar 25, 2007
Let's not be overly pedantic. There are lots of reasons people will Digg one submission over another. So it's not the end of the world that there are duplicates.
williamdyerMar 25, 2007
I check mine at freeterrorscore.com! Inaccurate terror scores can cause you to be unnecessarily served halal meals if you are "detained." Check your score now! Free!
thegilmanatorMar 25, 2007
@SlvrEagle23More specifically, they're HP D530s, which, through my experience at work, have a tendancy to kill their hard drives pretty frequently. The case doesn't handle heat very well and bad things happen.
synaesthesiaMar 25, 2007
I always thought a Wikipedia-style terror-intel directory would be a miracle for the Intelligence community. Imagine if instead of covering everything from Pokemon to Ancient Greece, the articles were of various terror members and suspects, including links to their associates and suspected actions. Entries could only be made by members of the intelligence community (FBI, NSA, CIA, DoD-components, etc) and would include citations to intel-reports, state the name of the person providing the intel, and have an icon or symbol that designated how sure the author was of the intel's accuracy.
Closed AccountMar 25, 2007
"........and has created serious concerns..."Yea...right. Exactly WHO has "serious concerns"?? Let me guess, the "Hate America First" crowd like the ACLU or People for the American Way. They are ALWAYS on the side of terrorists.......
elipabstApr 14, 2007
@NoSpaceForRent "Our last name is Garcia, a fairly common hispanic last name"I heard something (I believe on NPR) about a large number of very common hispanic surnames being on the terror watch list. I can't for the life of me figure out why they'd want to do that because of the absurd number of false positives, but it's their show I guess. Interesting that all it takes is a simple flashing of a state drivers license, especially since the 9/11 guys all had valid IDs as well.
elipabstApr 14, 2007
I just recently read an interesting article about the CDCs large scale computer surveillance program that was implemented after 9/11 to spot clusters of illness that may represent the early stages of a bioterror attack. The system is designed similar to this one where it just culls large amounts of raw data and tries to make sense out of it. Apparently the whole thing is also a total clusterf*ck and is prone to false positives, to the point where congress is already talking about scrapping it after having spent hundreds of millions. My favorite part was how a medical coding error caused a bunch of cases of congestive heart failure (CHF) to get entered as CCHF, the code for Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever which set off all kinds of alarms and had them thinking a major attack had just occurred in somewhere in New Jersey.